Commiserate With Me
by Lambcow
Summary: "The boy was crying, he was shaking, wracking with sobs so bare and hurt, and yet, still Renesmee didn't feel like he could understand all she'd been through." Renesmee takes her power to new extremes, emotionally torturing people trying to vent her feelings and be understood. Pain loves company, after all, doesn't it?
1. Chapter 1

She was in Illinois now. Chicago. Some teen had been hitting on her in the cafe she was in and she decided to humor him. She led him out the back into an alley and smiled at him. The boy seemed to take that as an invitation and leaned in to kiss her.

Renesmee rolled her eyes and pushed him back against the wall before he could touch her. The boy laughed.

"You like control, yeah? No arguments here."

"Shut up," Renesmee commanded sharply, something other than lustful curiosity swimming in her eyes. Renesmee put one hand against the boys face and watched his eyes screw up in pleasure. She was projecting emotions into him. Making him feel what it felt to be in love with someone and be close to them. What it felt like to talk for hours with someone in their arms… the pure unadulterated bliss of seeing them again after they were in danger and you weren't sure if they would ever come back alive.

Renesmee watched as the boy peeked his eyes open to stare at her. She wasn't smiling. Not really, she was concentrating on the way this boy reacted to such strong emotions invading him. Had he ever felt these emotions for himself? Renesmee wondered what it was like to never feel so profoundly about someone and had a hard time imagining it. She'd had Jacob from nearly the moment she was born. No, she never knew what it was like to _never_ have love that strong.

She watched the boy's face as she changed the emotion. As she broke his heart. She poured the feelings she'd felt after Jacob had died into him. What it felt like to lose someone whom she held so dearly. Someone she had literally never known a life without. Jacob; her only love. Dead. She could feel the tears in her eyes but she refused to let them fall. She projected into this boy what it felt like to be betrayed by someone vital in your life. What it felt like to never be good enough for your parents. What it felt like to be hunted by an entire clan of evil beings of blood sucking proportions for something you could never control. She filled him with the physical pain of having bones broken one by one by rogue vampires who thought you were worth less than human.

The boy was crying, he was shaking, wracking with sobs so bare and hurt and yet still, Renesmee didn't feel like he could understand all she'd been through. It didn't matter that this boy sounded like he was on the verge of killing himself with grief. He could never understand. Because he was human and didn't even have the same capacity for emotion that Renesmee did. Love destroyed, soul fragmented with the loss of her other half. Literally bound on a level unattainable unless you were somewhat supernatural in nature. Destroyed. Betrayed. She couldn't trust her mother anymore. Couldn't rely on her father, and was left in the world entirely alone and a shell of herself without Jacob there.

No, this human could never understand. She let her hand drop from his face and the boy crumpled to the floor in the alley, gut wrenching, oscar winning, soul deep agony crawling out of his core being in dreadful tones of despair ripping out of his lips. He was saying names, pleading loved ones to come back, to love him again, to look at him for once. His eyes were glazed and frantic as he looked around wildly at random moments pleading with death to take him or for his family to find him and release him of the pain.

Renesmee stood over him with a careful air. "I'll love you," she told him. And she was lying, true, but she didn't tell him that. She held out a hand, crouched down and brushed his hair out of his face.

"I'll keep you safe," she murmured to him. She filled him with peace as she rested her hand against his cheek.

His eyes cleared slightly and he looked into her eyes with so much pain… Renesmee found his misery comforting, even if she believed it could never compare to her own pain. "Me?" he asked in a whisper. He no longer believed in himself. His self-esteem had been crushed moments after he came into contact with Renesmee.

"Yes, you. Sebastian, I would never let you be alone," and as she spoke those words, Renesmee filled his mind with fake, fabricated memories of himself being Sebastian (Renesmee didn't care what his name was before, she would call him whatever she damn well pleased and she would make him believe that was all he ever was). She fed his subconscious an entire life story with being abandoned by parents, left to live on the street, never being loved… the boy's eyes clouded over as his life was rewritten for him. Renesmee built the story into his mind where she felt no blockage. His mind was truly easy to hack into, he'd never been one to keep secrets, Renesmee supposed. Some people were harder to do this to, because they more actively practiced lying and deception… but this boy… he was an open book. And Renesmee had a tub of white-out and an entire box of brand new Sharpies.

Renesmee made Sebastian believe he had lived weeks, months, years by Renesmee's side. She made him feel like every moment he had spent away from her had been like he had been dying inside. Every moment not with her had been like not breathing, drowning in the ocean, a physical pain in his chest so strong it brought him to his knees if she wasn't near. If she didn't text or if he didn't hear her voice. And when the boy's eyes finally cleared and he looked up from where he was still on the ground and saw who he knew to be the one most important thing in all of his life he cried out and stretched his arms out to touch her face.

But Renesmee had other plans. She simply smiled and backed out of his reach. The peace he had been feeling suddenly left the boy and he was left cold.

"Wha…" He couldn't articulate his confusion and hurt. Renesmee just smiled (though it didn't reach her eyes, it never did anymore) and shook her head.

"We're through, Sebastian. I can't be with you anymore. I have more important things to do than waste my time with the likes of… you." She stood up entirely, standing over the boy still in the dark alley and started to retreat. He called after her in despair, desperation, _need_ and tried to follow her. But she was already gone. Already moved on to her next victim. This one she wouldn't use emotions to kill. No, she wanted to try something new next time. But in the meantime the boy, who as far as he was concerned was a twenty year old named Sebastian Price from Canton, Ohio chased after a girl he couldn't even recall the name or face of anymore (Renesmee never showed her face in his implanted memories afterall). And he wept like a child until he finally couldn't bare the emotions and collapsed on a bench somewhere in a sleep so deep he probably wouldn't wake for hours. And when he did, he was going to need a lot of therapy. Or a gun, he supposed in his last moments of consciousness. Because then he could just end all the pain himself and it would be _over_.

When "Sebastian"'s twin sister, Alicia, was contacted about her missing brother being found three days later in the hospital with no recollection of anyone in the family or of any of his life, only delusions of being "Sebastian" all of his family cried too.

"Joe, come on, you have to remember me! You're my best friend!" And it wasn't a lie, but it didn't matter. Joe wasn't Joe anymore. Never had been as far as he knew.

Renesmee watched on from a distance, having followed the boy to see what would become of him. She only wished she too could forget all of who and what she was. She wished she could have been someone else without the burden of her memories following her.

But she was still Renesmee. Still a Cullen. She couldn't call herself a Black anymore. Jacob left her. Died on her. He _promised_ he would _never_ die. They only had twenty years together. That wasn't _fair._ And even if she hated all of her family for their endless loves as well, she knew a Cullen was the best description she had left of who she was. But even that felt bitter. No, she was just Renesmee. She was Renesmee alone, a survivor and a killer… she definitely had problems. Definitely needed help.

But she didn't care. Instead she only smiled as Alicia mourned and cried at the loss of her brother. "Joe" as he were, was dead. In his place was a stranger.

The whole world seemed to be filled with strangers these days.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: For Siiillltt for convincing me with their review to write another chapter. I have some ideas for where ths could go, but I'm not exactly good at writing long stories since I suck at commitment, but hopefully you like this addition. Leave me areview, feed the dragon... maybe I'll make this into something yet...

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It wasn't until Renesmee found herself back at her hotel suite later in the wee hours of the morning and she let her head rest on the immaculately fluffed pillows of the expensive room that she felt anything. But after a few minutes too long without being able to fall asleep and being too tightly wrapped in the soft, warm blankets she felt herself struggling. She was too warm, too comfortable, it was too dark in the room. She struggled out falling off the bed in her urgency to get away from the blankets which seemed to vice around every part of her like snakes.

His face haunted her in the darkness. Like it did every time she closed her eyes. Renesmee didn't want to think about him. Didn't want to miss him. This was _his_ fault, after all. But instead of forgetting him like she wished she could in that moment, she heard his voice like he stood beside her, or held her in his arms. His musky scent practically permeated the air from some unknown dimension where he should be stood in this world. Where he should be alive and fine and saying sweet things to Renesmee.

But instead of all those things, Renesmee felt herself frozen in place, her breath ragged as she imagined what he would say if he could see all she was doing with her life now.

"You shouldn't have done those things to that boy, Renesmee. What did he ever do to you? Nothing deserves that, Ness." His voice was loving, pleading, beautiful in Renesmee's mind, even if he wasn't here and he was very reprimanding at the same time.

"Jacob…" She didn't mean to say it out loud, she wanted to be angry at him. That he was gone.

"You would never have done this before, Ness. I'm disappointed in you. You've fallen so far off the reservations. Don't you _see_ that?" In her mind's eye he was angry, eyes full of unspoken hatred, rage, disapproval. "You're not my Nessie anymore."

"Jacob…" Renesmee said it again, arms wrapping instinctively around her middle, around the still straining blankets and sheets she'd become impossibly tied in trying to rid herself of them. "I know you're mad, I know I haven't been thinking straight lately, but-"

"Renesmee! You may as well have killed that boy! He will never have his life back! Don't you see that? He will never be able to move forward!"

Renesmee felt awful, streams of tears hot streaming down her face like a torrential rain. But the comment bit at her, his voice making her feel so much worse than anything else. Why couldn't she just _forget?_ "What, like you can say anything! You- you're dead! You _left_ me! _His life?"_ Renesmee felt hysterical laughter bubble out of her. "Jacob, what about _my_ life? I can't be the person I was when you were here _without_ you! I… I don't know how to be me without you. And it's your fault too… you never let me be my own person! You controlled me! I never really had my own choices as a child! Everything was already mapped out and decided!"

Renesmee felt Jacob fade from the half crazy conversation she was having with herself. Moments like these she wondered if she should be more bothered by her ability to connect with things around her that didn't really exist. But she always brushed it off as a side effect of her powers. Renesmee was still shaking with sobs and the blankets were really starting to make her feel like a caged animal.

With a slightly feral cry she reached into her back pocket for her switchblade and just cut the blankets off of her. She scrambled away from the offending cloth and scrambled shakily to her feet. She felt dirty, sick to her stomach with regret.

How could she let herself do that to the poor boy? She came to face the mirror in the bathroom, moonlight from a window lighting the room.

Everything the echo of Jacob in her mind was trying to get her to acknowledge was true. She wasn't the person she had been. The hair on her head was a lie. These waist long auburn curls, Jacob used to run his hands through when they were together… they weren't who she was anymore. She only even kept her hair long because Jacob had liked it anyway. She hadn't liked her hair for years.

But maybe Renesmee wasn't ready to let go of Jacob. _But he was so easy to leave you,_ a dark part of her mind reminded her, the part that had smiled at the pain of a broken family only a few hours ago.

Fists clenched at her sides before unclenching. How was dying his fault, anyway? If anything it should be her own fault! He was trying to save her anyway. Not that Renesmee asked him to save her. She told him not to come after her, that he had to keep himself safe. But of course he hadn't listened. Of _course_ he _had_ to play hero and try to save her. She _told_ him! And he'd still come running in, guns blazing (metaphorically) without a plan or backup- _No!_

Renesmee stopped her thought process right there. She couldn't think about that day. Refused to. She'd already spent the last six months trying to block out the pained sounds of his screams-

Case in point, her hair, who she was… she couldn't do ths anymore. She couldn't pretend to be this person anymore. Especially the she kept hurting people late at night like a real vampire… except she didn't drain the blood out of people, no, that frankly wasn't as appealing as it was to suck the happiness, the life, the morals- the hope- from people's eyes.

She hated herself even now as she stood avoiding her eyes in the mirror as she remembered the feeling she had felt when that boy she'd manipulated the other day had looked to her to pick up his broken pieces, desperation in her eyes. She was his hero- for those moments _she_ was _important._

She met her eyes in the mirror finally and glared. The girl that stood in her reflection was dead. She died with Jacob, she knew that now. Sweet Innocent Little _Nessie_ Black- hell, _Cullen_ \- was dead. What was left was Renesmee: a girl, new in a world she had never had the chance to see on her own before, and she was anything but innocent, or sweet. She was a monster it would seem. Heartless, a manipulative, powerful bitch. And that suited her just fine.

Renesmee pulled her long hair back in a tight ponytail and took the switchblade from the counter where she lay it in her left hand and clenching her jaw in determination and cut her hair off to nearly the butt of the tie.

She let the hair fall and pulled the rest of her hair out, musing it with her hands until it stood unruly.

Better.

She gaed at the hair pooled on the floor and felt her stomach flip. It really ways too bad she couldn't cut the sorrow and pain of Jacob out of her soul the way she could chop hair from her head. Things would be so much easier that way.

But there was one thing she could do.

She reached into her pocket for her phone and deleted all her contacts.

Alice, Jasper, Emmett, Rosalie, Esme, Carlisle, Mom, _Dad_. Renesmee ignored the pang in her gut as she erased them one by one. She'd already disabled the GPS tracking as soon as she'd left home, but she hadn't had the heart to entirely delete them.

She tried not think about it as she went into her pictures. _He_ was the main focus of most of them, wolfed out or otherwise. Just his smiling face in some… Renesmee clenched her teeth as she remembered he'd left her and she angrily selected to delete all.

She didn't need him. He held her back. It was time to be her own person. The one she was always supposed to be, not the cardboard cut out of the perfect wife and child her family had tried to make her for over thirty years.

 _Screw them._

Renesmee finished clearing her phone of her past and packed up her single bag of belongings and left the hotel, planning on burning the contents as soon as possible. She left the dead hair where it had fallen.

She couldn't care less. She didn't- wouldn't- couldn't care about anyone or anything anymore.

Everyone always betrayed her and she wasn't going through that again. No, now Renesmee would fly solo and be whoever the hell she felt like being in the moment.

She had no sympathy left.


End file.
